Our Posthuman Future; Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution

New York, N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xiii, [1], 256 pages. Footnotes. Figures. Includes Preface, Notes, and Bibliography. Chapters include Pathways to the Future; Being Human; and What to Do. Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama (born October 27, 1952) is an American political scientist, political economist, and writer. Fukuyama is known for his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which argued that the worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free-market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle may signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and become the final form of human government. However, his subsequent book Trust: Social Virtues and Creation of Prosperity (1995) modified his earlier position to acknowledge that culture cannot be cleanly separated from economics. Fukuyama is also associated with the rise of the neoconservative movement. Fukuyama has been a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies since July 2010 and a Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. In August 2019, he was named director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy at Stanford. Before that, he served as a professor and director of the International Development program at the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University. Previously, he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. To reorient contempoary debate, Fukuyama underlines man's changing understanding of human nature through history: from Plato and Aristotle's belief that man had "natural ends" to the ideals of utopians and dictators of the modern age who sought to remake mankind for ideological ends. Fukuyama persuasively argues that the ultimate prize of the biotechnology revolution--intervention in the "germ line," the ability to manipulate the DNA of all of one person's descendants--will have profound, and potentially terrible, consequences for our political order, even if undertaken by ordinary parents seeking to "improve" their children. Derived from a Kirkus review: To clone or not to clone? asks social philosopher Fukuyama in his latest disquisition on science and society. Reproductive cloning and therapeutic cloning are not the author's only concerns. What are we to do in a society that uses and abuses Prozac and Ritalin, one that is eager to exploit potential genes for intelligence or height or prolonged aging? Grim scenarios follow: the rich with designer babies; the poor ever more deprived; societies, even democracies, doomed to stagnation from the weight of aging natives dependent on youthful immigrants. And on and on to a "posthuman" existence in which membership in the human race may be problematic, given a genome spliced with so many non-Homo sapien genes. What to do? Fukuyama argues the need to restore notions of human rights, human nature, human dignity. Here he is in his element, critiquing the philosophies of Hobbes, Hume, Mill, Locke, Kant, Marx, et al., down to contemporary theorists. Fukuyama concludes that human values are intimately bound up with human emotions and that these are intrinsically linked to "species-typical behavior ". The final leap is to human dignity, the notion that all humanity exists on a higher moral plane than the rest of the natural world. It follows that acts that deny human dignity, such as reproductive cloning, should be banned outright. As for therapeutic cloning, genetically modified foods, human genetic engineering, etc., Fukuyama urges regulation and wariness. Though he has famously said that there can be no end to history as long as science marches on, he worries lest science take us over the edge of the slippery slope. Give credit to the author for laying out how we got to this pass and why we need to act.